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Week 3 (and final part) of “What they should be teaching at school” – Curiosity.

If curiosity is supposed to have killed the cat, then in my case, curiosity probably changed my life. Earlier in my career, I was offered the opportunity to relocate overseas. When I asked my manager why I had been chosen, he replied that I had “asked the right questions” to justify my selection. In fact, I had no idea that I was in contention for the role – I was simply interested in the new project from a business perspective. I hadn’t even considered whether I wanted the role itself – but my questioning apparently displayed the right amount of curiosity, and I was seen as the right fit for the job.

Being curious means you are less willing to simply accept something as “received wisdom”. It shows that you want to make sense of things for yourself. It helps you ask why things are done a certain way (especially if the answer is “because they’ve always been done this way…”). It demonstrates you want to find out how things work for yourself.

The downside is you may be more disbelieving, more sceptical, and prone to being suspicious. It can also mean you distrust certainty. But I would gladly take a level of ambiguity over a sense of complacency any day. A questioning nature can act as a defence mechanism against hype, cant and bullsh*t.

I hope kids learn how to take their early curiosity (and not just their knack for asking “but, why, mummy, why?”) into later life. Curiosity is how we learn to find our passions and interests outside the formal school curriculum and the set learning model. Our natural curiosity helps us to make sense of the world. I don’t think I would have developed any real critical thinking if I hadn’t strayed “off piste” and explored books that were not on the list of set texts.

Recently, I explained to a former colleague how I had participated in a number of startup and tech hackathons, even though I’m not a coder or programmer. My ex-colleague asked, almost in disbelief, “why would you do that?” Apart from being part of my journey into a new career path, my answer was simple: “Because I was curious, because I wanted to learn something, because I wanted to network and make new connections, and because I also wanted to get out of my comfort zone.”

In my view, if you stop being curious, you stop growing as a person, you stop developing your mental faculties, and metaphorically, you stop breathing.

We are used to ‘agile’ in terms of project management and software development; it’s even been applied to a style of business management itself. From the agile process, we recognise the value of continuous learning from a combination of task-based collaboration, iterative experimentation, rapid validation and constant improvement.

So it would make sense to deploy agile learning in school. Whether it’s research methods, data validation, practical experiments, rapid testing, team collaboration or scenario planning, agile thinking can foster the ability to be empathetic, consider alternative perspectives, evaluate different contexts, and respond to new data or situations.

While it’s important to learn core foundational facts and key conceptual frameworks, we can’t remain rigid in the face of new information. But the rate at which our knowledge is changing (new science, new data, new discoveries) also means it’s a challenge trying to keep up. Therefore, agile thinking is essential to being able to gather appropriate information, process and interpret the data, construct and validate innovative theories, and apply them to new situations, based on the available evidence. This approach should also foster greater creativity, build stronger reasoning skills, and see the development of logical thought processes.

It’s been a number of years since I worked for a large organisation, but I get the sense that employees are still largely monitored by the number of hours they are “present” – i.e., on site, in the office, or logged in to the network. But I think we worked out some time ago that merely “turning up” is not a reliable measure of individual contribution, output or efficiency.

No doubt, the rhythm of the working day has changed – the “clock on/clock off” pattern is not what it was even when I first joined the workforce, where we still had strict core minimum hours (albeit with flexi-time and overtime). So although many employees may feel like they are working longer hours (especially in the “always on” environment of e-mail, smart phones and remote working), I’m not sure how many of them would say they are working at optimum capacity or maximum efficiency.

For example, the amount of time employees spend on social media (the new smoko?) should not be ignored as a contributory factor in the lack of productivity gains. Yes, I know there are arguments for saying that giving employees access to Facebook et al can be beneficial in terms of research, training and development, networking, connecting with prospective customers and suppliers, and informally advocating for the companies they work for; plus, personal time spent on social media and the internet (e.g., booking a holiday) while at work may mean taking less actual time out of the office.

But let’s try to put this into perspective. With the amount of workplace technology employees have access to (plus the lowering costs of that technology), why are we still not experiencing corresponding productivity gains?

The first problem is poor deployment of that technology. How many times have you spoken to a call centre, only to be told “the system is slow today”, or worse, “the system won’t let me do that”? The second problem is poor training on the technology – if employees don’t have enough of a core understanding of the software and applications they are expected to use (I don’t even mean we all need to be coders or programmers – although they are core skills everyone will need to have in future), how will they be able to make best use of that technology? The third problem is poor alignment of technology – whether caused by legacy systems, so-called tech debt, or simply systems that do not talk to one another. I recently spent over 2 hours at my local bank trying to open a new term deposit – even though I have been a customer of the bank for more than 15 years, and have multiple products and accounts with this bank, I was told this particular product still runs on a standalone DOS platform, and the back-end is not integrated into the other customer information and account management platforms.

Finally, don’t get me started about the NBN, possibly one of the main hurdles to increased productivity for SMEs, freelancers and remote workers. In my inner-city area of Melbourne, I’ve now been told that I won’t be able to access NBN for at least another 15-18 months – much, much, much later than the original announcements. Meanwhile, since NBN launched, my neighbourhood has experienced higher density dwellings, more people working from home, more streaming and on-demand services, and more tech companies moving into the area. So legacy ADSL is being choked, and there is no improvement to existing infrastructure pending the NBN. It feels like I am in a Catch 22, and that the NBN has been over-sold, based on the feedback I read on social media and elsewhere. I’ve just come back from 2 weeks’ holiday in the South Island of New Zealand, and despite staying in some fairly remote areas, I generally enjoyed much faster internet than I get at home in Melbourne.

In the first article, the conclusion seemed to be predicated on the idea that robots will destroy more “jobs” (that archaic unit of economic output/activity against which we continue to measure all human, social and political achievement) than they will enable us to create in terms of our advancement. Ergo robots bad, jobs good.

While the second report painted a depressing picture of where most economic wealth continues to be created. Of the 200 Wealthiest People in Australia, around 25% made/make their money in property, with another 10% coming from retail. Add in resources and “investment” (a somewhat opaque category), and these sectors probably account for about two-thirds of the total. Agriculture, manufacturing, entertainment and financial services also feature. However, only the founders of Atlassian, and a few other entrepreneurs come from the technology sector. Which should make us wonder where the innovation is coming from that will propel our economy post-mining boom.

As I have commented before, the public debate on innovation (let alone public engagement) is not happening in any meaningful way. As one senior executive at a large financial services company told a while back, “any internal discussion around technology, automation and digital solutions gets shut down for fear of provoking the spectre of job losses”. All the while, large organisations like banks are hiring hundreds of consultants and change managers to help them innovate and restructure (i.e., de-layer their staff), rather than trying to innovate from within.

With my home State of Victoria heading for the polls later this year, and the growing sense that we are already in Federal election campaign mode for 2019 (or earlier…), we will see an even greater emphasis on public funding for traditional infrastructure rather than investing in new technologies or innovation.

Finally, at the risk of stirring up the ongoing corporate tax debate even further, I took part in a discussion last week with various members of the FinTech and Venture Capital community, to discuss Treasury policy on Blockchain, cryptocurrency and ICOs. There was an acknowledgement that while Australia could be a leader in this new technology sector, a lack of regulatory certainty and non-conducive tax treatment towards this new funding model means that there will be a brain drain as talent relocates overseas to more amenable jurisdictions.